Rio Bravo
is one of the supreme achievements (hence justifications) of
"classical Hollywood," that complex network of determinants
that includes the star system, the studio system, the system of genres and
conventions, a highly developed grammar and syntax of shooting and
editing, the interaction of which made possible an art at once personal
and collaborative, one nourished by a rich and vital tradition: it is an
art that belongs now to the past; the period of
Rio Bravo
was its last flowering.

The film at once is one of the greatest westerns and the most complete
statements of the themes of director Howard Hawks. One can distinguish two
main currents within the western genre, the "historical" and
the "conventional": the western that is concerned with the
American past (albeit with its mythology as much as its reality), and the
western that plays with and develops a set of conventions, archetypes,
"stock" figures. Ford's westerns are the finest
examples of the former impulse, and in the westerns of Anthony Mann (for
example,
Man of the West
) the two achieve perfect fusion.
Rio Bravo
is among the purest of all "conventional" westerns. Here,
history and the American past are of no concern, a point amply
demonstrated by the fact that the film is a virtual remake (in its
thematic pattern, its characters and character relationships, even down to
sketches of dialogue) of Hawks's earlier
Only Angels Have Wings
(set in the Andes mountains) and
To Have and Have Not
(set on Martinique). Hawks's stylized and anonymous western town
is not a microcosm of American civilization at a certain point in its
development but an abstract setting within which his recurrent concerns
and relationships can be played out. All the characters are on one level
"western" archetypes: the infallible sheriff, the fallible
friend, the "travelling lady," the garrulous sidekick, the
comic Mexican, the evil land-baron. On another level, however, they are
Hawksian archetypes: the overlay makes possible the richness of
characterization, the detail of the acting, so that here the archetypes
(western and Hawksian) achieve their ultimate elaboration. With this goes
the remarkable and varied use Hawks makes of actors' personas:
Martin, Dickinson, and Brennan have never surpassed (perhaps never
equalled) their performances here, and the use of Wayne is etremely subtle
and idiosyncratic, at once drawing on his "heroic" status
and satirizing its limitations.

The film represents Hawks's most successful transcendence of the
chief "binary opposition" of his work, its division into
adventure films and comedies. Here the thematic concerns of the action
pictures— self-respect, personal integrity, loyalty, stoicism, the
interplay of mutual respect and affection—combines with the sexual
tensions of the comedies (Wayne's vulnerability to women permitting
a fuller development of this than is possible with, for example, Bogart in
To Have and Have Not
). The ambiguous relationship of Hawks's work to dominant American
ideological assumptions (on the one hand the endorsement of individualism
and personal initiative, on the other the rejection of established society
in favour of the "primitive" male group, the total lack of
interest in such central American ideals as marriage, home and family)
permeates the whole film. The "gay subtext" that many
critics have sensed in Hawks's films—their tendency to
become (in his own words) "love stories between
men"—surfaces quite clearly in the Dean Martin-Ricky Nelson
relationship, though it is never allowed expression beyond the exchange of
looks and is swiftly "contained" within the group (a
progression beautifully enacted in the famous song-sequence). Within a
system necessarily committed, at least on surface level, to reinforcing
the status quo, Hawks's cinema continuously suggests the
possibility of alternative forms of social and sexual organization.

—Robin Wood

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